Musings

Contemplative insights are threatening to disrupt a deep tenet of economic mentalities: self-interest. If the self does not exist as a real entity in the world, but is a bundle of cognitive processes, then is acting in our own self-interest to act on illusory grounds? If all things are interconnected, then self-interest is necessarily interdependent...

In humankind’s perennial quest for wisdom, truth, and reality, we’ve employed myriad methods - forms - of inquisition into what lies beyond conditioned experience – experience in the raw, or the murky depths of human subjectivity in which we hope to find some redemptive experience of the unknown...

Schopenhauer writes, "every man is pent up within the limits of his own consciousness, and cannot directly get beyond those limits any more than he can get beyond his own skin.” But is this the case? Or are there moments that rip us right out of that skin, into the fields of Socratic Wonder...

In much the same way that Einstein said no problem can be solved from the level of consciousness that created it, Carl Jung & E.F. Schumacher tell us that to solve the "most important problems of life" does not require greater insight into the problems, but greater insight into our selves...

Alan Watts displayed a healthy skepticism towards the utilitarian approach to spiritual practice, an approach rampant in Western culture. To meditate "for" something is to miss the point. Watts explores alternate "disciplines of nonverbal perception", including the "bearing-in-mind" approach...

"You have the option of being hooked up to an 'Experience Machine' that keeps you in a state of permanent happiness. Would you do it?" Robert Nozick and Thomas Metzinger argue the negative, because most of us want our bliss grounded in something 'real' or 'meaningful'...

Paradox points to both the end of logic, and the ineffability of reality. Of paradox's many embodiments spread across human endeavors, a look at three: Sanskrit's Sandhyabasha, Keats' negative capability, and Jung's inherent polarity of the psyche.

Institutional religion is fading into obscurity as the rise of science and individualism presents us with a difficult question: what’s next? Reclaiming spirituality as an American ideal, in the spirit of Emerson, offers hope.

Thought is a human potential that Hannah Arendt writes can carry us from the trivial to the transcendent; a sort of highway leading from the finite into the eternal. Bertrand Russell's own experience with contemplation ratifies this idea, as he wrote in a letter to his friend...